


ava adore

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Falling In Love, M/M, Pining, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, oh fuck i love you, scurvy ruins everything, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:07:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27503536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: James understands now why his body bears Francis Crozier’s name.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 23
Kudos: 74





	ava adore

_"Now I must lie down where all the ladders start,_  
 _in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."_  
\- W.B. Yeats, _The Circus Animals' Desertion_

* * *

Most bodies are blank. Look at them, spy the empty arms, the barren legs. Clean as a page, ready to write our stories upon. _It's a gift_ , James Fitzjames had thought bitterly, _being left untouched and to your own devices._ James had been born complicated, having no name of his own save the one invented for his baptism, yet written on his hipbone in black letters was someone else. Another name, in a dark and severe serif typeface, bearing the unknown _Francis Crozier._

 _"The Devil take you, Francis Crozier,"_ James had hissed one night, age sixteen, drunk on stolen wine. He had tried to burn it off once, putting a candle to his skin. After the blister healed, the name still spitefully gleamed, just as sturdy and steadfast as before. James has learned not to think of it. He learns to cover it, to hide it, to lie about it. The Royal Navy demands, upon a sailor’s joining, the disclosure of any such marks, but James forges a physician’s signature, attesting to his clean, unspoiled body, and never breathes a word aboard ship. Years pass. He takes no lovers at home or sea, only nameless men in foreign ports, always with a false identity and never visiting the same bed twice. 

They are not happy marks, the names. For who would celebrate the name of the man who will slay you? Who would look with joy upon the name of their killer?

Over the centuries, some of the marked have sought legal recourse, seeking to jail their future murderers before the deed was done, but the consequences always far outweighed the outcomes. Imagine a life spent under scrutiny, imagine a life of well-intended bars - and still no one has ever avoided their fate. Fate slips between bars, fate finds ways to break in. Fate spins the wheel and breaks in when she chooses, iron and law be damned. So James stays silent, dark eyes ever on _Terror’_ s captain, wondering how it will end. For it will someday, you just never know how or when. 

We never get to know. Death comes when it wishes, unannounced and uninvited. 

A terrible houseguest.

* * *

The first year, watching Francis’ fury flash across tables, seeing teacups upset by his pounding fist, James is certain it will be murder. Something violent and brutal, perhaps, fitting the drunk brute himself. It’s almost a pleasure now, imagining how Francis will suffer after. Will Sir John have him hanged? Shot? Will they court-martial him here or drag him back to England in chains, manacles chafing at his ankles? James stays far away on Erebus, always a furious shadow close to Sir John’s side. When Sir John goes to the ice, James wonders if Francis might come to justice at all. Look now, with no one to reel him in, how Francis drinks and drinks and drinks - perhaps he will kill James in a stupor, cracking a glass bottle over James’ skull. 

_(You'd leave Jopson to clean the mess, you blasted beast.)_

One night, deep in the sunless winter, Francis punches James in the jaw. For a moment, reeling backward, his skin still bitten by cold and his body swallowed by half-frozen slops, James wonders if this is it, if this is the night. The night laid out for him, distilled to James and Francis and the blood between his teeth. 

* * *

Francis has his whiskey bottles poured out that very night; James watches, biting his inner lip, brow furrowed. A bruise forms on his cheek, as mottled and violet as a battered plum. 

He almost wishes that the illness takes Francis with it; perhaps he might escape his own fate then. He washes and looks once again, finding _Francis Crozier_ still carved into his skin, as certain as a gravestone. He finds blood in his hairline. James pulls his hand away, rubbing the redness between two fingers, entirely lost. 

The Francis that returns to them, after three weeks of wretched illness, is not a Francis he’s ever met. James watches him uncertainly, chewing always at his lip, finding that this Francis is a gentler one, kinder. They share meals; Francis makes him laugh. He never reaches for a drop. James watches. They all do. Perhaps it will be accidental. It’s easy enough, out here at the end of the world. Consider it, one day while walking between ships, Francis could slip, pulling James down with him, his blood the most color the snow has ever seen. Imagine it, climbing unsteady masts and pitching forth, falling to the ice below.

He cannot imagine this Francis raising an unkind hand to him. It doesn’t make sense.

His gums bleed and his mouth always tastes of iron. 

* * *

On an entirely unremarkable day and unremarkable moment, James Fitzjames realizes he is in love with Francis Crozier. They sit together by a fire, each telling fond stories of happier times. 

“You should have seen it, James, all the men in their finery and boots, dancing a quadrille with cigars in their mouths. The strangest ladies I’ve ever met, I daresay.” Francis looks over at James, his pale eyes full of a blue warmth; eyes like open water, like leads to take you home. James’ chest tightens, he knows at once it is love.

When Francis steps between James and a gun, shielding James with his own body, James wonders if you might die from a broken heart. At night, in his bedroll, he runs a hand over the familiar name on his hipbone, the macabre marker somehow comforting. In his tent, with the practiced silence of a man who had grown up among many, a man unused to privacy, his hand finds its way between his thighs, pretending to be Francis’ rope-roughened fingers. It is not Francis’ touch, but it’s what he might have, so he takes it all the same. 

The bullet wound reopens. He had known it would, every sailor knows the ghost stories of scurvy. How the blood will seep from your pores, the exhaustion in your bones, the sores in your mouth; how the body will dissolve on its own, each and every scar slowly coming unstitched and undone. He stands in his sunlit tent, fingers shaking, prodding at the familiar wound. He had been cavalier when it had happened, telling stories in sickbay, knowing that the man who had shot him had not been named _Francis Crozier_. It had not been the bullet wound before, it could not be now. The name on his body, the cause of death prewritten upon his skin, does not say _scurvy._ It does not say _a bullet shot clean through the arm, into my side, the size of a cherry._

Perhaps they will be saved.

Perhaps.

* * *

Love. It is infuriating being in love. James keeps silent, mouth in a thin, pressed line, watching Francis. Where does love arise from? How is love separate from desire, from adoration? There are other men James finds more beautiful than Francis, men shaped like sweat-soaked Davids carved by adoring hands, but Francis is different. Why is he set apart? Sometimes, when James glances quickly back at Francis, he half-expects to find a man formed of pure light. 

_I love you because I love you._ The most frustrating statement, yes, and the most true.

* * *

Still, the name lingers on his body. James rubs at it with furious hands, betrayed that love has erased nothing.

Is not love transformative? (It has changed him, yet not enough.)

* * *

For two weeks, he pulls the sledges, following Francis into the sun, across ice and shale. For two weeks, he hopes. When he falls, knees nearly shattering on white limestone, Francis helps him gently into a sledge, pulling him to the next camp as carefully as he might, anxious not to jostle James’ aching bones. 

"Are you comfortable, James?" Francis asks. The word comfortable has become their currency. _Are you comfortable? Am I? Let me get you a pillow, a glass of water._ We cannot reach in with a knife, scrape out the disease ourselves, so we soften the blow. Goodsir repeats it over and over and over again. We can make him comfortable. James, your body has gone off the tracks. Lost the recipe. Breaking apart in all the wrong places. 

"I'm sorry."

"What in heaven for? How on earth you were walking at all will puzzle me the rest of my days. You've got holes in you, James."

"That shot was fired six years ago. It's going to murder me yet."

Francis shakes his head. James is laid out like a stain, like an oil spill on the pale cot. Unmoving and preternaturally still, save for the occasional wince, save for the furrow of his brow. His hair like a crushed spider on the pillow. The bruised plum of his face. A sunset on his zygomatic arch, mottled peaches at the supraorbital ridge. Reds and purples, his damaged and bleeding chest.

"If it doesn't, it's going to make that Chinese sniper story you're so fond of recounting a half-hour longer to tell," Francis says, trying to make him laugh. Even now, Francis still tries.

He comes to James' bed each night, sitting for hours, holding his thin hand. His eyes are wet; James can see the glimmer in the lamplight. His thumb strokes the back of James’ hand.  For once, in James' long memory, the captain does not seem to know what to do with himself.

"I wish I could have seen it. Bit of a lark, really, coming all this way and - " James coughs. There is blood in his spit. Blood everywhere. 

"Shh," Francis says. "Don't push yourself."

"Francis."

"James, don't - "

"No, I need to. If I see you again - "

"You will get well. We will get you well."

"Francis."

Francis sits quietly. James watches how his hands shake.

"When I see you again, tell me a story. If you see the Passage. If you get there, tell me what it's like." 

"James."

"Francis," James says. His voice is weak. "Tell me a story."

"I'm afraid I don't know anything - "

"Please. Just - " He swallows. "I just want to hear you talk."

So Francis talks. 

At night, under the hard, unblinking sky, they share a sleeping sack. Rough canvas on an unforgiving floor. The cold creeps in and doesn't cease. Under the cover of the darkness, James takes his hand, damp and sticky. Francis doesn't pull away.  He runs through an index of fish in his mind. He knows the carp, the mackerel. Cod and haddock, plaice and sole. The fishmonger’s cry, come buy, come buy! He knows knots. Vinyl rope. How to measure the speed of wind, the height of waves. Proximity. Depth. Velocity. Strength of magnetic attraction.  Francis tightens his fingers around James' own. Later, when James wakes, Francis' arm is heavy over his chest, like a husband holding a beloved wife. 

Weight, always weight. His heart should be heavy. Here, in steady arms, it grows light instead.

It was once said that the love story, the scaffolding and structure by which we come to terms with the violent maelstrom of ourselves, is what we must offer the world in order to be reconciled with it. The framework forces what is illogical, our messy hearts, into something that can be broken down piecemeal and fed to each other; that in offering _I love, I was in love, I loved him_ we might be understood. Our madnesses excused and excised at once. The love story is predicated on separation; in the interval of lover and beloved is the distance the lover wishes to close. _The heart is a lonely hunter,_ Carson McCullers  once wrote. Hearts are lonely, cannibalistic things, seeking to swallow other hearts whole. Love me, they beg, bite me back.  Consider the reversal. For an instant, we are not the predator but the prey. There is the sound of footsteps, the whisper of a voice, the beating of a heart beneath the floorboards, blood spilled that isn’t your own; there is something seeking you, something aching and incomplete that wishes to consume you. The ghost walking beside you, reaching out with a mouth open for a cry or a kiss. 

So then, all love stories are ghost stories and all ghost stories are love stories. 

Two sides of the same coin.

* * *

_(A dream, feverish and bright white:_

_“Say it,” Francis says. Low and broken. That voice licking up at James like flames. Say it. He could stall, ask for clarification. He doesn’t need it. They both know the unspoken question. Say it. His head swirls in dizziness, a flash of vertigo, of nausea. The sick washes over him, the wave of ataxia. He is sweaty and shaking._

_Say it._

_“I love you,” he rasps. Finally. Francis' knuckles have long since gone white._

_“Fuck,” the older man groans in blackness, half a whisper. Francis stares at him; his eyes as wild and panicked as an unbroken horse._

_Francis grips at him, his fingers digging into his shoulder, his hips. There is a moan that snakes up the back of James' throat. Francis tastes of salt, of dust. James' lips are bruised, split under the pressure (teeth scraped against skin). He tastes the blood, like iron, in his mouth. “Oh God,” he moans, hot breath against the curl of Francis' ear. He feels the other man tense and twitch beside him._

_James has lost his balance, he sways slightly. He sees only a flash of darkness. His eyes are open but unseeing, unfocused. He goes by touch. Callused fingers press along the sides of his face, gripping at his shoulders. There is the sweep of touch like a moth’s wing along his cheekbone. “I cannot be blamed for this,” Francis whispers brokenly, skin to skin, mouth to mouth, sealed upon each other like they are desperate for air._

_Hands rove over the swells and eddies of their bodies. There are public senses and private ones. We navigate the world by sight, sound, smell. The others, touch and taste, are more private. James has never touched Francis before, has never tasted him. He feasts. Inhales iron muscle, flesh like clay and yielding to his explorations. Consumes the taste of the other man, eyes clenched in a mix of ache and sick want, licks away salt, licks away ash. In the beginning, there is salt. It is in every recipe, the building block of all food, intensifying taste, delivering flavor and pleasure. Salt is critical for our bodies, a central component. Without sodium, we would die. Francis tastes like salt.)_

* * *

James wakes, sweating. Francis is still there.

* * *

This is a very old story. You already know how it begins. You already know how it ends.  Every love story is the same and this is no different: _I have loved you,_ it says, _and must cope with that._

James understands now why his body bears Francis Crozier’s name. 

“Francis,” he begs. “Help me out of it.” There is a bottle of poison near, a bit of kindness stoppered in green glass. James wonders when he last saw a true green. 

Francis’ hand tightens, his mouth twitches with a thick swallow. He’s crying, James knows. He can hardly see, his eyesight failing and faint, but he would know Francis anywhere and in any way. When the poison touches his mouth, James imagines it's the wine they might have shared on a wedding night. When Francis massages it down his throat, he imagines they might be making love. Perhaps it is, in a sense. James watches Francis with heavy, cloudy eyes. Someone loves him enough to see him off carefully. Someone loves him enough to close up the house and lock the doors, to turn off the lights when he goes. 

( _I love you._ Perhaps he said it, perhaps Francis did. He cannot bring himself to regret it. Is love defined by length? By fervor? Is love only earmarked by years and traded rings, by kisses and long nights? Love is simply that. It might exist forever, it might exist for an instant. The terror of love is the fear of loss, the inevitable first exit, for one of us must always go first. He will spare Francis this. Francis will never fear for him, for he will already be gone.) 

The hand in his never lets go.

There was a name on his body, there from the start, of the man who would love him to the careful end.

**Author's Note:**

> Title brazenly nicked from "Ava Adore" by The Smashing Pumpkins.


End file.
